Sev's not-so-perfect memory

Adam Stephanides · 14 Jul 2003, 13:25 · from urth-v0307.mbox · original

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From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) Sev's not-so-perfect memory
Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2003 08:25:35 -0500
Message-ID: <urth-v0307-3676 at digest.urth.net>
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on 7/12/03 11:31 AM, Josh Geller at brunians at brunians.org wrote:

> On Sat, 2003-07-12 at 07:25, Adam Stephanides wrote:
>=20
>> What convinces me is the number of discrepancies Roy has found, rather t=
han
>> any specific one.  We know that Wolfe is a careful writer; if he were go=
ing
>> to create a character who really had a perfect memory, he would surely h=
ave
>> cross-checked the character's later recollections of events with the
>> original accounts.
>=20
> In a fifteen hundred page book?
>=20
> Without a computer?
>=20
> No one, as far as I know, is arguing that Gene Wolfe has a perfect
> memory.

And Wolfe undoubtedly knows he doesn't have a perfect memory.  Which is why,
if he had intended to create a character with a perfect memory, and to
provide many illustrations of this perfection, he wouldn't have relied on
his own memory to get it right.

And he must have had an outline, or some other means of locating events in
his manuscript.  Otherwise he couldn't possibly have written a 1500-page
book in which the parts are so complexly related.

--Adam

--=20

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